Longtime search watcher John Battelle and I seem to be in the minority that believes a little cooperation could enable each company to play to its strengths and grow its own business. Cross-licensing would make the core products of each stronger and would still maintain competition in areas like unified communications, identity management and creating the most powerful interest graph. No doubt licensing would be complicated. Possibly, to avoid privacy concerns and assuage regulators, each company must get access to the other’s data only after it has been anonymized. Each could combine its own data with the anonymized data to offer opt-in personalization features (e.g., relevant search results, info filtering, preferred content) and targeted marketing to its own users. That might require a third party to act as clearinghouse for the data exchange.

But what’s the harm in negotiating? Maybe all the drama is just to get the companies to the bargaining table. There’s no telling what’s really going on behind the scenes. But data licensing between any of these companies would make their current products stronger, even without some complex three-way solution.

Question of the week

What are the chances that Google, Twitter and Facebook will cross-license data?

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This is David Card's personal blog. I get paid to think about the intersection of media, technology and consumer behavior. Fun, huh?